Colour Sheets!

So what I'm working on at the moment is a set of hand made resources to help people choose colour schemes, primers, and basecoats. Yesterday was my trial run for layering.

The basic ideas are this;

Sheets of paper sprayed with a fine but complete layer of primer, fully dried
Working from left to right progressive layers of colour are added. The paint starts off at typical milky consistency. The first swatch of a colour has one layer, the second has two, and so on.

I'll be doing this over various primers. This set of colour sheets is designed to help people choose what primer to use, or what colours will look like over their primer. Lots of people don't always realise how much that first spray is going to affect their final work - hopefully this will help everyone, and myself, predict better what our final colours are going to look like. I've been surprised by how much better some colours stand out on black than grey or white, for example.

Also it is going to show how many layers it takes paints to become opaque or whether they are opaque to begin with. When painting over darker basecoats knowing just how translucent your paint is can make a huge difference to how you shade and highlight.

So the first set of colour sheets I did had 8 strips, starting off at just below 50:50 paint thinner. Next time I'll probably do about 6 strips with 25:75 paint or 20:80 so the progression is better. While I was painting the layers the differences were much more visible but now it's dried they all look the same from the third or fourth swipe. I'll redo those colours against last though because gooood it got boring after a while.

I made sure I was painting with the same brushes and strokes; red sable, two even strokes next to each other. Each layer was perfectly dry before I applied the next one.

Nowdog is staring at me for a walk so I will have to end here and trot round the fields with el capitan labrador!